Try New Things: 5 Tips for Making Marketing Less Scary

For someone who works in marketing—a profession that constantly changes and evolves—I am embarrassingly slow at adopting trends. I pay attention to them because my job requires it, but my body resists like a dog being dragged to the vet. 

I carried a CD Walkman around my college campus when everyone else had iPods. Most of my Spotify library, which I only started building last year, came out before 2007. (Depeche Mode and The Cure are timeless!) My eyebrows? Historically tragic. (I mean, MY GOD, just look at that photo below.) And of course, I insisted on wearing bootcuts and flares well into the era of skinny jeans, only to suffer the withering ridicule of Gen Z a few years after I finally adopted them. (I can’t. Do. This. 😭)

Part of my resistance comes from a strong sense of identity that I’m deeply proud of. Nothing’s cooler than just being yourself and looking however the hell you want, and I’ve always tried to do that (as evidenced by the teen mall-goth glory in my last post). But if I’m honest, part of it is also my age getting the better of me—of being stuck in my ways and uncomfortable with new things. As a marketer, I know giving into that instinct is a one-way ticket to irrelevance, and that’s something we should all resist.

So if you’re about to launch a book or an author career but don’t want to start an email list or build a social media following, I have bad news: You kind of have to. The good news? It can be way more fun and way less scary than you think.

Someone travel back to 2009 and help this poor girl. EYEBROW BLINDNESS IS REAL.

As with most trends, I was late to adopt Instagram and even later to TikTok, but my job pushed me onto both platforms. And while being an almost-4o-year-old on TikTok is sometimes painfully humbling, it’s also incredibly enriching. The next generation is politically informed and brilliantly creative in their own unique way, and learning from them is a powerful tool for growth.

Case in point: our current presidential election. Up until Biden stepped down, Kamala Harris’s social media accounts were fairly quiet—the type of party-line messages you’d expect in support of the current administration. But as soon as the major players endorsed her candidacy, she set her marketing team loose, and it’s been a thing of beauty to behold.

I’m betting the people behind @KamalaHQ are a bunch of seasoned millennial marketers with a ton of experience, but they’ve clearly paid a lot of attention to Gen Z, adopting their viral trends, pop songs, and biting humor. They quickly raised $200 million during their first week and generated more than 100,000 new registered voters, 84% of whom are under the age of 34. F*ck yeah, Project Coconut!

Now, are you immediately going to KILL IT on social media the first time you post? Probably not. And do you need to adopt all those Gen Z trends? Absolutely not. (Seriously, no dancing is required.) But you do need to take a cue from them in terms of being unabashedly, unapologetically yourself—in a public way.

You’re writing your book for a reason, right? I’m guessing that reason is because you’ve got a message to share—a desire to help or inspire readers. That’s a commendable goal, but getting a book onto store shelves is only half the battle. If you don’t wave a flag to let people know your book exists, how is anyone going to find it in a sea of a million other books?

I know it can feel intimidating. Authors tell me all the time how much they fear marketing. So here are five tips that will hopefully make putting yourself out there feel a little safer and more manageable:

• 1. Think of your brand as a relationship. If you’re worried about coming off as inauthentic, try thinking of your brand as the relationship you’re building with your reader. Who are you to them, specifically? We all do this to a certain extent: The version of Jenn that I bring to work is a different version than the Jenn who goes to the family Christmas party or the Jenn who belts out Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” at the karaoke bar on Saturday night. And that’s fine, right? It doesn’t mean I’m being fake in any of those scenarios; it just means that I’m bringing forth particular qualities about myself that are most relevant in those environments—what I call “curated authenticity.” You can do the same for your readers. Identify the two or three things that you are a) knowledgeable about, and b) excited to discuss, and make those the touchstones of your online presence.

• 2. You don’t have to do everything—just pick one or two. The marketing tools you choose should at least be tolerable and at best feel a bit fun and exciting. If you hate writing emails and try to start an email list, your readers are going to sense that. They won’t enjoy reading those emails any more than you enjoyed writing them. If you can’t stand being on camera and try to start a TikTok, your viewers are going to sense that too, and I doubt they’ll hit the “follow” button. At the same time, if you don’t try to use any of the tools, you could be missing out on something truly wonderful. I’ve known plenty of authors who were reluctant to get on social media and suddenly flourished there. Just pick whatever platform feels most comfortable and give it an honest try.

• 3. Recycle content. If you want to tackle more than just one or two marketing tools, I strongly recommend doing this. Who says you can only post something in one spot? If you write a fantastic blog entry, you can easily adapt it for your email list and pull an inspirational quote or two for social media. (I’m literally doing that with this blog post right now.) If you have a podcast, you can pull video clips from the recording and use them as Instagram reels and TikTok posts. Only a fraction of your followers on any given platform are actually going to see each of your posts, so it makes sense to share it in multiple places.

• 4. Pay attention and try new things. Learn from the pros in your field whose emails, social posts, podcasts, etc. you most enjoy. Spend a bunch of time looking through your social feed and familiarizing yourself with what’s effective before creating your own content. If an Instagram or TikTok trend looks fun and you want to give it a try, do it! You might feel silly, and maybe it’ll flop, but no one’s instantly perfect at any of this. Social media is like learning a new language, and while the younger generations were born with iPhones in their hands, you may need to practice and work at it—which is TOTALLY OKAY.

• 5. Commit to being consistent. I always tell my clients that consistency is better than quantity. Yes, it would be fantastic if you could post every day, but do you honestly have the time to do that for the long haul? If not, pick a schedule that feels truly sustainable (for me, that’s two per week) and stick with it for at least six months to a year. Yes, you read that right: a year. Unless you’re super lucky, your first several posts aren’t going to go viral. Marketing’s often a long game. Remember: You’re building a relationship with your audience, and outside of Las Vegas weddings, that doesn’t typically happen overnight. If you want people to invest their money and time in your book, you need to invest in them.

As I approach middle age, I’ve committed to staying engaged with the world, trying new things, and getting better at what I already do. A year and a half ago, I started teaching myself to play the guitar, and the first video I posted was pretty terrible. 😅 Today? I’m less terrible—sometimes even kind of alright! My point is that if you want to do something, you should be okay with sucking at it for a while. You’ve just got to try. Ideally, I hope to be “trying” things all my life.